“Disabled, no! D-abled”

a discursive analysis of the statements of a deaf person who uses oral language on his Instagram profile

Abstract

This article, affiliated with Discourse Analysis from a materialist perspective, presents a study on the words of an oralized deaf person on his profile on the social network Instagram. It is based on the understanding of the object of discourse as an effect of meanings between subjects in certain historical conditions of reproduction/transformation. With this work, we seek to understand the meanings of the statements put into circulation in/through digital media by one of the oralized deaf influencers who do not use Libras (Brazilian Sign Language), Alex Júnior, taking as a corpus of analysis the published stories “Meu livro”, available on the profile, in which he deals, as the title of the highlight suggests, both with the process of constructing his book and his way of entering social networks, his performance as a digital influencer, speaker and, also, the way in which he attributes meanings to himself and his deafness. To develop the research, we carried out a discursive analysis taking into account the aforementioned social network and its operating mechanisms; the way in which the profile of the oralized deaf subject is presented on the social network; and, above all, how this person produces and circulates certain meanings through their publications. In our analysis, we found an equivocal discourse (Orlandi, 2017) that, in its attempt to distance itself from prejudiced statements about subjects with disabilities, ends up, through the tensioning of the discursive formulation, reproducing meanings supported by capitalist and neoliberal ideology (by establishing a relationship between disability and the efficiency of subjects) in a productivist and business world. It is through this mode of signification, moreover, that Alex Júnior, in his profile, does not call himself “disabled”, but “D-abled”. With this denomination, the influencer seems to try to free himself from pre-constructed concepts that, in/through the capitalist mode of production, signify those who escape what is considered “semantically normal”. Thus, such discourses have their genesis in an exclusionary society that prioritizes profit and not the human being as a value.